The importance for customer reviews in local search is nothing new. When it became well-known that reviews were making an impact in the search engines, business owners, along with their friends and families, started leaving reviews on their own listings, online reputation companies started syndicating reviews across the web, and agencies even began offering the […]

What is an hCard?

hCard microformat is not it’s own programming language, rather, it’s HTML that is appended to certain snippets of information to tell computers “Hey this is a person’s name,” or other commonly published attributes such as an address, review, event, blog post, or phone number. An hCard is technically a virtual business card for a particular person, but for local search you can use it to denote a business location.

I always wanted to be the Red Power Ranger. Forget the utterly "girly" Pink or the “just sorta there” Yellow, I had to be the Red. I longed to be the strongest. Being a child of the ever nostalgic 90’s, I was a huge fan of the show that teamed up five teenagers in skin tight suits and pitted them against destructive monsters who they would in turn save the world from. The Red Ranger was the leader of the team, had the most powerful weapons and was the main character.

I recently received the following questions regarding a "local search" presentation that I gave to a group of businesses in San Diego at SCORE. For a little background, the presentation covered the basics of local search, including setting up the Google Places listing, best-practices in regard to business name, description, etc., creating citations, the primary directories that Google indexes, review management, etc.

In the past few years social media and craft brewing have seen a huge increase in both attention and use. Social media is allowing companies and customers to connect in a new, non traditional way. Which allows for very direct and almost instantaneous exchange of information that both sides love and it’s free. As such it seems fitting that Craft Brewers, Micro Brewers, Nano Brewers, etc.